About the Blog

I will post a new entry every few weeks. Some will be new writing and some will be past work that has relevance today. The writing will deal in some way with the themes that have been part of my teaching and writing life for decades:

•teaching and learning;•educational opportunity;•the importance of public education in a democracy;•definitions of intelligence and the many manifestations of intelligence in school, work, and everyday life; and•the creation of a robust and humane philosophy of education.

If I had to sum up the philosophical thread that runs through my work, it would be this: A deep belief in the ability of the common person, a commitment to educational, occupational, and cultural opportunity to develop that ability, and an affirmation of public institutions and the public sphere as vehicles for nurturing and expressing that ability.

My hope is that this blog will foster an online community that brings people together to continue the discussion.

Thursday, December 4, 2014

The federal
Department of Education is proposing a set of regulations for teacher education
programs. There is a 60-day period for the public to comment on these
proposals. You can read the Department’s November 25, 2014 press release here.

Some of the
proposed regulations are reasonable (graduates giving feedback to their teacher
education programs) and some are terribly wrongheaded, repeating the disastrous
kind of thinking that shaped No Child Left Behind: for example, teacher ed
programs would be evaluated based on the test scores of the children taught by
the programs’ graduates. There are logical and conceptual problems as well as
technical ones with this proposal, as I will argue in my upcoming posts.

Over the next five
weeks or so, I am going to repost three pieces I wrote in late 2013 and early
2014 on teaching and teacher education. They are relevant to the current
discussion of teacher education and to the proposed regulations from the
federal Department of Education.

Here is the first.

***

Smack in the
middle of the fiery debates about teacher education is the troublesome fact
that we lack a fitting and consensual definition of teaching itself. In his
blistering 2005 report on teacher education programs, former president of
Teachers College, Arthur Levine, noted the “schism [in] teacher education
between those who believe teaching is a profession like law or medicine,
requiring a substantial amount of education before an individual can become a
practitioner, and those who think teaching is a craft like journalism, which is
learned principally on the job.” Levine may well be capturing a significant
ideological or rhetorical distinction in the current debates about how to
educate teachers, but the distinction illustrates our problem, for teaching has
elements of both profession and craft, as Levine defines them—and even that
fusion of the two terms doesn’t fully capture a teacher’s work.

Teaching
done well is complex intellectual work, and this is so in the primary grades as
well as Advanced Placement physics. Teaching begins with knowledge: of subject
matter, of instructional materials and technologies, of cognitive and social
development. But it’s not just that teachers know things. Teaching is using knowledge
to foster the growth of others. This takes us to the heart of what teaching is,
and why defining it primarily as a craft, or a knowledge profession, or any
other stock category is inadequate. I’m not sure there is any other work quite
like it.

The
teacher sets out to explain what a protein or metaphor is, or how to balance
the terms in an algebraic equation, or the sociological dynamics of prejudice,
but to do so needs to be thinking about how to explain these
things: what illustrations, what analogies, what alternative explanations when
the first one fails? This instruction is done not only to convey particular
knowledge about metaphors or algebraic equations, but also to get students to
understand and think about these topics. This involves hefty cognitive
activity, as any parent knows from his or her experiences of explaining things
to kids, but the teacher is doing it with a room full of young people—which
brings a significant performative dimension to the task.

Thus teaching is a
deeply social and emotional activity. You have to know your students and be
able to read them quickly, and from that reading make decisions to slow down or
speed up, stay with a point or return to it later, connect one student’s
comment to another’s. Simultaneously, you are assessing on the fly Susie’s
silence, Pedro’s slump, Janelle’s uncharacteristic aggressiveness. Students
are, to varying degrees, also learning from each other, learning all kinds of
things, from how to carry oneself to how to multiply mixed numbers. How
teachers draw on this dynamic interaction varies depending on their personal
style, the way they organize their rooms, and so on—but it is an ever-present
part of the work they do.

As is the case
with any of the helping professions, teaching is value-laden work. Society has
a host of expectations about what education should be. And, though prospective
teachers may be attracted to the work for lifestyle reasons (schedule,
benefits), many want to teach because they are drawn to helping young people
grow, or are passionate about a subject, or want to contribute to the creation
of a just world. They commit to do this work in institutions, so they have to
figure out how to navigate the institution’s demands, balancing their beliefs
with institutional strictures. And either in their day-to-day-encounters with
students or in their role as institutional beings they will face difficult
decisions, ethical conundra, be, at times, pushed to the limit of their
psychological and spiritual resources.

So teaching Hamlet or The
Bluest Eye, the internal combustion engine, photosynthesis, or the League
of Nations involves knowing these topics and bringing them into play in one of
the more complex cognitive and social spaces in our culture. I don’t see this
representation of teaching in any of the major reports or national debates on
teacher education. That is one big reason, I think, why our discussions of teacher
quality and teacher evaluation tend to be reductive, and why the assault on
teacher education programs—even for those of us who desire big
improvements—feels rigid and one-dimensional.

There are a number
of ideas in the air about teacher education: what’s wrong with college and
university programs, what alternative programs should do, and the
qualifications of those entering the teaching force. These ideas come from
federal and local governments, from reports and advocacy groups, and from the
opinion pages of our major newspapers. Some of these ideas, though they may be
well-intentioned, run the risk of reducing teaching to knowledge delivery or
technical craft. I want to consider these ideas in this and subsequent posts.

***

Balancing
Course Work and Practice

Preparing
people to teach, as I just described it, is a tall order, for at its best it
requires an effective blend of acquiring knowledge, opportunities to practice
what’s learned, and reflection on that practice. Most kinds of complex work in
our society—from law enforcement to surgery to fashion design—require this
blend and typically begin with some form of classroom-based instruction, though
the length of that instruction can vary considerably.

A major source of the criticism
education programs have drawn over the years—both from within and outside of
its ranks—has to do with the sequencing of the elements of this blend and the
emphasis given to each. To be sure, faculty vested interests, institutional
inertia, and plain old ineptitude can affect the curriculum—and recent critical
reports have focused on these sins—but there are also intellectually legitimate
differences of opinion about sequencing and emphasis. (A classic educational
question is how much preliminary instruction you provide before setting someone
loose on a task, from using a power tool to writing a poem.) There are ethical
considerations as well—when is the right time to move a novice out into a real
setting, even with supervision? These questions can be found not only in ed
schools but also in police academies, medical schools, and fashion programs
across the country. The current criticism makes it sound like teacher ed
programs are one big static mess, but the fact is that a number of them have
been working and reworking their curriculum, trying to get the right balance
for their students and their region. I saw this experimenting going on twenty
years ago in several small, semi-rural colleges I visited, and I see it today
in large universities such as UCLA, where I teach.

A
statistic that you’ll hear in this discussion of coursework and practice is
drawn from the Levine report I mentioned earlier. Fifty-eight percent of
teacher ed alumni on average reported that their programs prepared them “very”
or “moderately” well for the classroom; forty percent of principals thought
their teachers were prepared. These are not great numbers, though I do want to
say more about such surveys in a later post. But for now, let’s agree that many
young teachers could be getting better direct experience with students and the
complexities of running a classroom—something alternative programs promise.

I
think, though, we need to be clear-eyed about something: Even when programs
provide substantial opportunity for pre-professional practice, the transition
to autonomy and full responsibility is difficult, even daunting. Since the
medical school is often held up as a model of educating for practice, consider
the fact that there is a decent-sized research literature on how hard young
physicians find the transition from medical school to their first year of
residency. There are common reports of depression, anxiety, feeling
overwhelmed, and struggles to convert what one has learned into practice. And
unlike teachers, the residents have on-call support from team members and
supervising physicians. It is also the case—thinking back to those unsatisfied
principals—that supervising physicians frequently express dissatisfaction about
the preparation of their residents. My point here is not to discount the need
for more hands-on classroom experience—not at all—but to urge a little humility
about how difficult the transition from student to autonomous professional can
be.

One
thing that concerns me about the current debates is a tendency on the part of
some advocates for alternative teacher education to downplay or dismiss teacher
ed coursework. I certainly don’t want to defend this course work en mass. I
went through a teacher education program—an early alternative one—and know how
lightweight or irrelevant some courses can be. They certainly don’t reflect the
richness of teaching. But we have to be careful to not strip away what the
worthwhile courses contain: bodies of knowledge about everything from learning,
to culture, to the very definition of what it means to be educated.

It’s not that prospective teachers
should master, let’s say, texts by Piaget, Vygotsky, and Jerome Bruner, or
commit to memory the results of a long history of experiments on the transfer
of training from one domain to another. Rather it’s that studying and
discussing and writing about all this, if done well, helps young teachers deepen
their understanding of cognition and learning, provides a way to think about
the lessons they’ll teach, the assignments they’ll give, the many, many moments
when their students will say or do something that vexes them.

To
be sure, prospective and practicing teachers can acquire knowledge about
cognition and learning in settings other than formal teacher ed courses,
settings closer to and integrated with their work in the classroom. (Though
colleges and universities house people who have a command of the educational
literature.) Whether in a standard program or an alternative setting, the
challenge is to forge substantial connection between—to stick with our
example—a tradition of research on learning and helping the young people before
you learn. To separate the literature on learning from classrooms is to condemn
it to irrelevance. But to minimize the importance of that literature is to
minimize the conceptual content of teaching, and we have a troubling,
century-old institutional case study in Vocational Education of what can happen
when the conceptual and theoretical dimension of work is diminished. Education
is reduced to narrow, entry-level job training.

Another
criticism of teacher ed programs is that they do not demonstrate the
effectiveness of their graduates in improving student achievement—with
achievement typically defined as an increase in standardized test scores,
currently in reading and math. Many alternative credentialing programs claim
that they can or will be able to demonstrate effectiveness in this way.

There’s
a legitimate and important question in this criticism: Is a training
institution doing a good job of preparing students for their work and careers?
One way teacher ed programs answer this question is through pass rates on
licensing exams. Some programs also survey their graduates, and some have
connections with their districts or target schools and receive formal or
informal feedback from them. But overall, teacher ed programs could do a much
better job of getting information on their graduates—and some people within
teacher ed have long been calling for better data collection. In a mild defense
of teacher ed, let me note that building better data systems and mechanisms for
more detailed feedback is not easy and is expensive, especially for large
metropolitan programs whose graduates might disperse far and wide. As a point
of comparison, most medical schools don’t do any better: They tend to rely on
pass rates on licensing exams and satisfaction surveys of their graduates.

The
evaluation mechanism that many critics advocate—judging a program’s
effectiveness by the test scores of the students taught by their
graduates—seems like a fairly straightforward proposition, but, in fact,
presents a host of conceptual and design problems. To be honest, I’m a little
surprised that it’s being promoted with such gusto, given recent history.
Recall the multiple problems that arose with NCLB’s use of standardized tests
to define achievement and determine a school’s or district’s effectiveness, and
there are the more recent debates about the technical complications in
assessing teacher effectiveness through value-added measures. It bespeaks of
either social amnesia or technocratic enchantment that we would rush to a model
driven by the standardized test score and, to boot, insert one more complex
variable into the chain of efficacy: now we have a putative causal chain that
goes from the student test score to the teacher to the teacher’s training
institution. Imagine judging business schools by the amount of money their
graduates generate for their employers. Consider the variables: There are the
individual characteristics and behaviors of the graduates, not only personality
traits, but also events that can affect their careers—marriage, family
disruption, illness. Then there are all the variables related to the place of
employment: the nature of the business, its economic status and organizational
health, the relationships among co-workers. As well, social and economic
conditions beyond the business affect it, and thus the performance of its
employees. As is too often the case with contemporary school reform, what seems
simple and straightforward is anything but. Teacher education programs,
traditional or alternative, need to adopt models of evaluation that rely on
multiple measures and that account for the complex nature of teaching and the
varied institutions where teachers work. Otherwise we’ll put in place a strong
incentive for teacher ed programs to reduce teaching to test prep.

There
is another significant component to this call for demonstrating effectiveness:
Do teacher ed programs instruct prospective teachers in “research-based”
teaching techniques and “best practices.” These terms have become part of our
reform vocabulary. And, again, who can disagree that we should be passing onto
young teachers the best of what we know how to do? The problem is that
“research-based” and “best practices” are often defined in narrow ways.

“Research-based”
means the demonstration that a particular practice is shown to increase a
standardized test score—the gold standard being a randomized control trial in
which a treatment group of randomly selected students receives the best
practice and a control group does not. Other models of research and study, in
the eyes of the more technocratically oriented reformers, are of much less
value. But there are other systematic ways that we come to know the truth or
legitimacy of something, as is evidenced in pursuits as different as astronomy
or moral philosophy. And even if we adopt the critics’ definition of research,
we have to contend with the fact that a randomized control trial—or its second
cousin, the quasi-experimental design that does not involve random assignment
to treatment or control—are elaborate and expensive to conduct. And given the
way they work, we might, if we’re lucky, get an effect, but it typically will
be a small one (practice x results in a point or two advantage
on a standardized test), and it gains statistical significance because of the
large numbers of students involved in the study. The further wrinkle is that a
second (expensive and elaborate) study might yield different results. So we end
up spending a ton of money to get little yield, money that would be better
spent helping teachers improve their knowledge of subject matter and various
ways to teach it and assess whether students are learning it.

The
other related problem is a tendency in policy and reform documents to present
best practices as though they were factory-tested electronics components,
applicable off the shelf to a wide range of settings and circumstances. There
is a mechanistic and acontextual cast to all this that is at odds with the
definition of teaching I offered earlier.

The
best practices approach is also being promulgated in medicine, but with a
telling difference. A particular practice is recommended for particular
conditions (a certain drug and treatment regimen for type II diabetes, let’s
say), but the physician is required to consider the context (the particulars of
the patient’s case and his or her life circumstances) and make a judgment as to
whether to use or modify the best practice. In education, the focus seems to be
on training the teacher to implement the best practice exactly as the developer
intended—so we have talk of “fidelity” of implementation. Context and judgment
are downplayed.

It
is probably the case that in particular alternative teacher certification
programs, the work on the ground is more nuanced and creative than the sense
one gets from documents and pronouncements from advocacy groups and talking
heads. But I do worry about a policy nexus of test scores, a focus on
technique, and a rigid notion of best practices that leads to a definition of
teaching and teacher education that is thin on creativity and judgment, human
relation and values.

Recently
I visited two adjacent classrooms in a school serving a low-income population.
Both teachers were in the middle of a math lesson, and while both teachers were
excellent, they couldn’t have been more different, at least on that day. In the
first room, the teacher had a series of related problems on the board and was
guiding her students through them in systematic fashion. She would present one
problem, put her index and middle finger to her lips indicating she wanted the
class to say the technical term for an element of the problem, then had the
students discuss the problem amongst themselves. After a minute or two, she
rang a little bell, and the children looked forward, and she called on them.
All the while, she was touching a child on the head or shoulder, checking in on
another, connecting something said earlier to a comment made now. Then on to a
new problem, a rhythmic flow of activities, the teacher moving like a choral
conductor.

In the room next door, the teacher had his students sort themselves
into groups by the answer they gave to a problem posed in the last class:
“Which number is greater, +5 or -5?” He told them to take a few minutes to
think of two reasons why they gave that answer. Once in groups, the teacher
engaged the students in discussion, asking why they chose the answer they did,
asking follow up questions, referring one student to another. At the break,
some of the students went to recess still talking about the problem. If the
first teacher reminds me of a conductor, this one brings to mind the
facilitator of a seminar. Two different approaches, but masterfully executed,
caring, thoughtful, intellectually rich. By every sign I could see, the
students in both rooms seemed engaged. We need teacher education programs,
wherever they are housed, that help people develop into these kinds of
teachers.

You can share this blog post on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Reader through the "share" function located at the top left-hand corner of the blog.

1 comment:

I retired from teaching specialeducation after 32 years two years ago. I now work as a teacher assistant in a special ed class. I didn't feel like I learned much in my teacher ed classes. It took me about five years to feel comfortable in the class and about ten to feel confident.

It appears to me that most of the people who teach teachers don't have the requisite experience to transmit the skills. You have to learn on the job and you can only teach in your own way.

The greater problem I see is that the punitive evaluation instruments will discourage people from continuing in the profession. I quit the year my district implemented TLE, teacher leadership effectiveness. The object appeared to me to be designed to standardize teaching so that experience wouldn't be much of a factor. Whatever it was, I found the instrument insulting and humiliating. That was that.